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Wednesday, July 07, 1999

Language Networks

Language Networks7/7/1999Clay Shirky

The 21st Century is going to look a lot like the 19th century, thanks to the internet.A recent study in the aftermath of the Asian financial storm ("Beyond The Crisis -Asia's Challenge for Recovery," Dentsu Institute for Human Studies) found that citizensof Asian countries who speak English are far more likely to be online than those whodon't. The study, conducted in Tokyo, Beijing, Seoul, Bangkok, Singapore, and Jakarta,found that English speakers were between two and four times as likely to use theinternet as their non-English speaking fellow citizens. Within each country, this isa familiar story of haves and have-nots, but in the connections between countriessomething altogether different is happening -- the internet is creating an Americanversion of the British Empire, with the English language playing the role of the RoyalNavy.

This isn't about TCP/IP -- in an information economy the vital protocol is language,written and spoken language. In this century, trade agreements have tended to revolvearound moving physical goods across geographical borders: ASEAN, EU, OAS, NAFTA. Inthe next century, as countries increasingly trade more in information than hard goods,the definition of proximity changes from geographic to linguistic: two countries borderone another if and only if they have a language they can use in common. The map of theworld is being redrawn along these axes: traders in London are closer to theircounterparts in New York than in Frankfurt, programmers in Sydney are closer to theircolleagues in Vancouver than in Taipei. This isn't an entirely English phenomenon: onthe internet, Lisbon is closer to Rio than to Vienna, Dakar is closer to Paris than toNairobi.

This linguistic map is vitally important for the wealth of nations -- as the Dentsustudy suggests, the degree to which a country can plug into a "language network,"especially the English network, will have much to do with its place in the 21st centuryeconomy. These language networks won't just build new connections, they'll tear atexisting ones as well. Germany becomes a linguistic island despite its powerhouseeconomy. Belgium will be rent in two as its French- and Flemish-speaking halves linkwith French and Dutch networks. The Muslim world will see increasing connection amongits Arabic-speaking nations -- Iraq, Syria, Egypt -- and decreasing connections withits non-Arabic-speaking members. (Even the translation software being developed reflectsthis bias: given the expense of developing translation software, only languages withmillions of users -- standard versions of English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian,German -- will make the cut.) And as we would expect of networks with differentstandards, gateways will arise; places where multi-lingual populations will smooth thetransition between language networks. These gateways -- Hong Kong, Brussels, New York,Delhi -- will become economic centers in the 21st century because they were placeswhere languages overlapped in the 19th.

There are all sorts of reasons why none of this should happen -- why the Age of Empireshouldn't be resurrected, why countries that didn't export their language by forceshould suffer, why English shouldn't become the Official Second Language of the 21stcentury -- but none of those reasons will matter. We know from the 30-year historyof the internet that when a new protocol is needed to continue internet growth, it'llbe acquired at any expense. What the internet economy demands more than anything rightnow is common linguistic standards. In the next 10 years, we will see the world'slanguages sorted into two categories -- those that form part of language networks willgrow, and those that don't will shrink, as the export of languages in the last centuryreshapes the map of the next one.